Sun Microsystems
- SUN redirects here, for other meanings see SUN (disambiguation).
| Company type | Public (NYSE: SUNW) |
|---|---|
| Industry | Computer hardware, software |
| Founded | 1982 |
| Headquarters | Santa Clara, California, USA |
Key people | Scott McNealy, Chairman & CEO Jonathan I. Schwartz, President and COO Crawford W. Beveridge, Executive Vice President, People and Places, and CHRO Greg Papadopoulos, Executive Vice President and CTO |
| Products | computer servers and workstations and supporting software, Java language, and more |
| Revenue |  $11.19 billion USD (2004) |
Number of employees | ~35000 (2004) |
| Website | www.sun.com |
Sun Microsystems, Inc. Nasdaq: SUNW is a vendor of computers, computer components, software, and information-technology services, founded in 1982 and headquartered in Santa Clara, California, in Silicon Valley. Sun's manufacturing facilities are located in Hillsboro, Oregon and Linlithgow, Scotland.
Sun's products include computer servers and workstations based on its own SPARC and AMD's Opteron processors, the Solaris operating system, the NFS network file system, and the Java platform. From June 2005, Sun also produces laptops called Ultra 3 Mobile Workstation. The pioneering OpenLook (Sun's own graphical user interface) was very stable but would now be considered minimalistic. A wide choice of windowing systems are now offered, including Open source contributions.
Sun Microsystems is headquartered on the west campus of Agnews Developmental Area in Santa Clara, California, which was formerly an asylum.
Brief history
The initial design for Sun's UNIX workstation was conceived when the founders were graduate students at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. The company name SUN originally stood for Stanford University Network (which is reflected in the company's stock symbol, SUNW, which now stands for Sun Worldwide). The company was incorporated in 1982 and went public in 1986. Its founders were Vinod Khosla, Scott McNealy, Bill Joy (a primary developer of BSD Unix), and Andy Bechtolsheim; McNealy and Bechtolsheim remain at Sun. Other Sun luminaries include early employees John Gilmore and James Gosling. Sun was an early advocate of Unix-based networked computing, promoting TCP/IP and especially NFS, as reflected in the company's motto "The Network Is The Computer". James Gosling led the team which developed the Java programming language. Most recently, Jon Bosak led the creation of the XML specification at W3C.
Sun's logo, which features four interleaved copies of the word sun, was designed by professor Vaughan Pratt, also of Stanford University. The initial version of the logo had the sides oriented horizontally and vertically, but it was subsequently redesigned so as to appear to stand on one corner.
Hardware
Sun originally used the Motorola 68000 CPU family for the Sun-1 through Sun-3 computer series. The Sun-1 employed a 68000 CPU, the Sun-2 series, a 68010. The Sun-3 series was based on the 68020, with the later Sun-3x variant using the 68030.
Starting with the Sun-4 line, the company used its own processor architecture, SPARC, a 32-bit RISC architecture which was later to become the IEEE 1754 standard for microprocessors. A 64-bit extension of the SPARC architecture (SPARC V9) was later introduced.
Sun has implemented multiple high-end generations of the SPARC architecture, including SPARC, SuperSPARC, UltraSPARC-I, UltraSPARC-II, UltraSPARC-III, and currently UltraSPARC-IV. Sun has developed several generations of workstations and servers, including the SPARCstation series, Sun Ultra series the Ultra Enterprise (later, simply "Enterprise") servers, the Sun Blade workstations and the Sun Fire servers. Sun also has a second line of lower cost processors meant for low-end systems which included the MicroSPARC-I, MicroSPARC-II, UltraSPARC-IIe, UltraSPARC-IIi, and UltraSPARC-IIIi.
Sun has had a difficult time keeping up with its competitors' processors' clock speed and computing power, but its customer base has been fairly loyal due to the popularity, and legendary stability, of its SunOS (and later Solaris) versions of Unix.
For the first decade of Sun's history, the company was predominantly a vendor of technical workstations, competing successfully as a low-cost vendor during the Workstation Wars of the 1980s.
For a short period in the mid-1980s, 51% of Sun stock was held by AT&T as a partner in their computer business AT&T Computer Systems. UNIX System V Release 4 was jointly developed by AT&T and Sun, who named their version Solaris 2. The AT&T partnership later fell apart when the rival group OSF (Open Software Foundation) appeared. See UNIX wars.
For a short period in the late 1980s, they sold a hybrid Intel 80386-based machine, the Sun386i. An x86 port of Solaris for PC compatibles was introduced in 1993. Currently, Sun is again selling x86 and AMD64 hardware and has introduced a 64-bit version of Solaris for AMD64 systems.
In the mid-1990s, Sun acquired Diba and Cobalt Networks with the aim of building network appliances (single function computers meant for consumers). Sun also marketed a network computer (diskless workstation, as popularized by Oracle Corporation CEO Larry Ellison). None of these business initiatives were particularly successful.
In the late-1990s, as Sun's workstations were lagging in performance when compared to that of their competitors and especially to Wintel Personal Computers, the company successfully transformed itself to a vendor of large-scale Symmetric multiprocessing servers. This transition was enabled by technology that was acquired from Silicon Graphics and Cray Research. The Cray CS6400 server line was transformed into the very successful Sun Enterprise 10000 large-scale servers. Driven by the increased prominence of web-serving database-searching applications, blade servers (high density rack-mounted systems) were also emphasized.
The Bubble and Sun's subsequent struggle for survival
During the dot-com bubble, Sun experienced dramatic growth in revenue, profits, share price, and expenses. Some part of this was due to genuine expansion of demand for web-serving cycles, but another part was synthetic, fueled by venture capital-funded startups building out large, expensive Sun-centric server presences in the expectation of high traffic levels that never materialized. The share price in particular increased to a level that even the company's executives were hard-pressed to defend. In response to this business growth, Sun expanded aggressively in all areas: head-count, infrastructure, and office space.
The bursting of the bubble in 2001 was the start of a period of poor business performance for Sun. Sales dropped as the growth of online business failed to meet predictions. As online businesses closed and assets auctioned off a large amount of high-end Sun hardware was available very cheaply. Much like Apple, Sun relied a great deal on hardware sales.
Multiple quarters of substantial losses and declining revenues have led to repeated rounds of layoffs, executive departures, and expense-reduction efforts. In 2002 the share price returned to the 1998 pre-bubble level, a pattern of escalation and decline comparable to other companies in the sector, and has hovered in the single digits since then. In mid-2004, Sun ceased manufacturing operations at their Newark, California facility and consolidated all of the company's US-based manufacturing operations to their Hillsboro, Oregon facility, as part of continued cost-reduction efforts.
Many companies (like E*Trade and Google) chose to build Web applications based on large numbers of the less expensive PC-class Intel-architecture servers running Linux, rather than a smaller number of high-end Sun servers. They reported benefits including substantially lower expenses (both acquisition and maintenance) and greater flexibility based on the use of open-source software.
Higher level telecom control systems such as NMAS and OSS service predominantly use Sun equipment. This use is due mainly to the company basing its products around a mature version of the Unix operating system and the support service that Sun provides.
Present focus
In 2004, in common with the trend of specialisation in the electronics industry, Sun cancelled two major processor projects which were emphasizing high instruction level parallelism and high operating frequency. Instead, the company chose to concentrate on processor projects emphasizing multi-threading and multiprocessing, such as the UltraSPARC T1 processor (formerly known as "Niagara"). The company also announced a collaboration with Fujitsu to use the Japanese company's processor chips in some future Sun computers. Finally, it has a strategic alliance with AMD to produce market-leading x86/x64 servers based on AMD's Opteron processor. To this end, it acquired Kaelia, a startup founded by original Sun founder Andy Bechtolsheim, which had been focusing on high-performance AMD-based servers.
In February 2005, Sun announced the Sun Grid, a grid computing deployment on which it offers utility computing services priced at $1 (US) per CPU/hour for processing and per GB/month for storage. This offering builds upon an existing 3,000-CPU server farm used for internal R&D for over 10 years, of which Sun claims to be able to achieve 97% utilization. In August 2005, the first commercial use of this grid was announced for financial risk simulations which was later launched as its first Software as a Service product with CDO2.
Sun's software initiatives are increasingly making use of Open Source, most notably including Solaris via the OpenSolaris community. Sun's positioning includes a commitment to indemnify users of some software from intellectual property disputes concerning that software. The announced business model is the sale of support services on a variety of bases including per-employee and per-socket.
In January 2005, Sun reported a net profit of $19 million for fiscal 2005 second quarter, for the first time in three years. This was followed by net loss of $9 million on GAAP basis for the third quarter 2005, as reported on April 14 2005.
On June 2, 2005, Sun announced it would purchase Storage Technology Corporation ("Storagetek") for US$4.1 billion in cash, or $37.00 per share. If approved, the merger would create a company with approximately 39,000 employees.
On June 26, 2005, Sun announced it would produce laptops. The laptop, called Ultra 3 Mobile Workstation, is based on Sun's Ultrasparc processor and running Solaris operating system. [1]
On September 12, 2005, Sun unveiled a new range of Opteron based servers, the Galaxy X4100 and X4200 servers, and the Aquarius X2100 server. These have been designed from scratch by the team led by Bechtolsheim to address heat and power consumption issues commonly faced in datacenters and are the first servers to display Sun's new brushed aluminium design.
On November 30, 2005, Sun's president and Chief Operating Officer, Jonathan Schwartz, announced the source-code opening of all its software under CDDL. Schwartz said that the objective was to eliminate the barrier represented by the initial investment in software licenses.
In December 2005 Sun joined HANA, the High Definition Audio-Video Network Alliance to help establish standards in consumer electronics interoperability.
Software
Operating systems
All Sun systems have been based on Unix systems which are well known for system stability and a consistent design philosophy.
The Sun 1 was shipped with Unisoft V7 Unix. Later in 1982 Sun provided a customized 4.1BSD Unix called SunOS as an operating system for its workstations. In 1992, along with AT&T, it integrated BSD Unix and System V into Solaris, which as a result is based on System V Release 4.
Sun offered a secure variant of Solaris called Trusted Solaris for releases before the current Solaris 10, which includes the same capabilities as part of the basic offering.
Sun is also known for community-based and open-source licensing of its major technologies. Though a late adopter, it has included Linux as part of its strategy, following several years of difficult competition and loss of server market share to Linux-based systems. Blastwave compiles and packages open source software for Solaris machines, and has automated software consistency tracking, upgrading and completing dependencies as part of the upload process. Recently, Sun has offered Linux-based desktop software called Java Desktop System (originally code-named "Madhatter") for use both on x86 hardware and on Sun's Sun Ray thin-client systems. It has also announced plans to supply its Java Enterprise System (a middleware stack) on Linux. It has already released its newest OS, Solaris 10, under the open-source Common Development and Distribution License.
Java platform
The Java programming language took the best features from the industry standard language C++ and removed nearly all of its more difficult or unsafe features, such as pointers. Backed with a massive class library, Java programs can call upon a large set of GUI, mathematical and Internet access code that is tried and proven.
The Java platform, developed in the early 1990s was specifically developed with the objective of allowing programs to function regardless of the device they were used on, sparking the slogan "Write once, run everywhere". While this objective has not been entirely achieved (prompting the riposte "Write once, debug everywhere"), Java is regarded as being largely hardware- and operating system-independent.
Java was initially promoted as a platform for client-side applets running inside the web browser. This positioning was never very successful and while browser-based applications have had considerable success in displacing compiled applications on the desktop, Java has never been an important part of the web-browser experience.
The platform consists of three major parts, the Java programming language, the Java Virtual Machine (JVM), and several Java Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). The design of the Java platform is controlled by the vendor and user community through the Java Community Process (JCP).
The Java programming language is an object-oriented programming language. Since its introduction in late 1995, it has become one of the world's most popular programming languages.
In order to allow programs written in the Java language to be run on (virtually) any device, Java programs are compiled to byte code, which can be executed by any JVM, regardless of the environment.
The Java APIs provide an extensive set of library routines. The Standard Edition (J2SE) of the API provides basic infrastructure and GUI functionality, while the Enterprise Edition (J2EE) is aimed at large software companies implementing enterprise-class application servers. The Micro Edition (J2ME) is used to build software for devices with limited resources, such as mobile devices.
Office suite
In 1999, Sun acquired the German software company StarDivision and with it StarOffice, which it released as the office suite OpenOffice.org under both GNU LGPL and the SISSL (Sun Industry Standards Source License). OpenOffice.org is designed to be compatible with Microsoft Office, is available on many platforms and widely used in the open source community.
The current StarOffice product is a closed-source product based on OpenOffice.org. The principal differences between StarOffice and OpenOffice.org are that StarOffice is supported by Sun, it is available as either a single-user retail box kit or as per-user blocks of licensing for the enterprise, it includes a wider range of fonts and document templates and what Sun claims to be an improved dictionary and thesaurus. StarOffice also contains commercially licensed functions and add-ons - in OpenOffice.org these are either replaced by open-source or free variants, or not present at all. Whilst new releases of OpenOffice.org are relatively frequent, StarOffice follows a more conservative release schedule supposedly more suited to enterprise deployments.
Notable persons
- Jonathan I. Schwartz, President and Chief Operating Officer of Sun
- Bryan Cantrill, of 2005 Technology Review "Top 35 Young Innovators"
- Whitfield Diffie, Chief Security Officer, co-inventor of public key cryptography
- Robert Drost, of 2004 Technology Review "Top 100 Young Innovators"
- John Gage, Chief Researcher
- James Gosling, co-inventor of Java language
- Steve Kleiman, inventor of the Virtual File System Switch, co-inventor of NFS, co-architect of the Solaris multi-threaded kernel, currently CTO of Network Appliance, Inc.
- Patrick Naughton, Java language project initiator
- Eric Schmidt, Former Chief Technology Officer of Sun, currently CEO of Google, Inc.
- Mike Sheridan, co-inventor of Java language
- Marc Tremblay, Chief Architect for Processors, Co-Architect for 1995's 64-bit UltraSparc I processor
- Dermot Duggan, Senior Director of Strategy
- Greg Papadopoulos, Executive Vice President and CTO
Founders
See also
- Java Desktop System
- Java Enterprise System
- Java applet
- Liberty Alliance
- Solaris Operating Environment
- Sun GridEngine ( SGE )
- NetBeans
- Sun Certified Professional
External links
Official Sun Information
General Unofficial Sun Information
- SunHELP - Sun News & Resources
- Online Sun Information ArcHive website
- Old Sun workstation information
Sun 3 Unofficial Information
Sun 2 Unofficial Information
- Sun2 Archive website
- Sun-2 Workstation Review, from Unix/World October 1984
- Sun2 Emulator running on NetBSD